Is the heroine a woman or a brand of car? If the author doesn't know, how can we?

Charles Spencer

12:01AM GMT 16 Mar 2007

Charles Spencer reviews Attempts on her Life at the National Theatre

Though not much of a name to conjure with in Britain, where he has often seemed an also-ran in the brave new world of contemporary drama, Martin Crimp is a big cheese in Europe, where experimental theatre enjoys more kudos.

Attempts on Her Life, first staged by the Royal Court in 1997, is reckoned by aficionados to be his masterpiece, and Katie Mitchell, who has already directed the piece in Italy, gives it the full works as the opening production of the NT's Travelex £10 season.

As in her recent adaptation of Virginia Woolf's The Waves, she is up to no end of high-tech tricks. There seem to be more cameras than actors on the stage, and most scenes are simultaneously filmed and projected on to screens, so that you often find yourself watching the film of the play rather than the play itself.

But then Crimp invites such gimmicks. His text has no list of characters, and speeches aren't assigned to any particular actor. A dash in the script will indicate a change of speaker, but apart from that it's up to the director to choose the number, sex and age of the performers, and to decide who speaks what. The only instruction is that the company "should reflect the composition of the world beyond the theatre" - but Mitchell selects a cast where women outnumber blokes by almost two to one, and there aren't any old or ugly people. It hardly seems representative of "the world beyond".

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The piece concerns a cryptic character called Anne, whose life and personality the actors constantly attempt to describe. But Anne, also known as Anya, Annie, Anny and Annushka, is polymorphous. At one point she's the mistress of a powerful man, at the next a terrorist. She's a conceptual artist and the wife of a Right-wing American survivalist. She's a porn star, a suicide, an alien abductee and even a brand of car.

With a weary jolt of recognition, one realises that she is anything Crimp wants her to be, as he attempts to pin down our moods, preoccupations and fears. He's also writing about the impossibility of ever really knowing anyone, though I believe we can know people a great deal better than this pessimist imagines.

As a picture of the Zeitgeist, and I find myself yawning as I type the phrase, both the play and Mitchell's production work well. Everything is edgy, dark, uncertain. There is particularly good stuff on the pseudy inanities of arts programmes, while Crimp's apprehension of a climate of terror and random violence seems prophetic, post-September 11. Mitchell's constant use of video also suggests an age in which we observe the world through the glass of our TV and computer screens, darkly.

But it's not enough. Theatre needs to do more than intrigue: it needs to move and involve us, and those are qualities beyond Crimp's grasp. I suspect that the reason he's never had an enduring hit after 25 years is that his writing has an off-putting coldness, and an ironic, self-advertising cleverness, that prove ultimately repellent.

Since Crimp can't be bothered to name his characters, I won't bother to name the 11-strong cast. They all perform with wit and ingenuity, keep the cameras running, mime a couple of porn sequences and even perform a little pastiche pop music. But do they touch us? Not once.